Snap is nearing its IPO. And as the clock ticks, it is doing its best to impress investors into placing their bets on it. The company is expected to go public sometime in March, and as part of its drive to encourage investors, has released a brand new video. The video, while talking about everything that is great in Snapchat, also takes a few digs at competitor Facebook.
Okay, so first CEO Evan Spiegel starts off the video by reiterating Snapchat’s main mission — which is of being a camera company. Comparing it to the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, Spiegel said:
Snapchat really tapped into that human desire to communicate in a way that feels like its face-to-face even if you’re far way.
The video then cuts to a conversation between Spiegel and Co-Founder and CTO Bobby Murphy, who go on to talk about the need for an app that would delete pictures by default and thus relieve people of the pressure to feel pretty or perfect.
Self-expression isn’t a contest.
The video then went on to talk about how Snap was inspired to create the “stories” feature, simply because of the fact that the founders did not like the reverse chronological order used by other social networks.
You were always scrolling backwards through a story and that didn’t really make sense to us.
And that was how the stories feature — later copied by Instagram — was created. The founders also mentioned that a greater number of friends did not necessarily mean a better experience. This has of course, been a point of contention between Facebook and Snapchat, with the latter preferring a more minimalistic approach where it comes to adding friends. Snap believes that adding fewer friends leads to a more intimate experience.
It’s not a throw things at the wall and see what sticks kind of company. We try to take time to really listen to what our community wants from our products
You can watch the full video right here. Meanwhile, we are likely to see a lot more content in similar vein from Snap. The company is gearing up for its IPO after all, and it will be working hard to ensure that it gets its message across to anyone who might be a potential investor.
